Cool and reminds me of a project from like 15 years ago. Forgot what it was called but basically it was just people hiding thumb drives and finding them like a geocache. Fun idea but then I remember Stuxnet and I'm like nah.
Pirate box is mentioned on that page. I forgot about that. I used to carry around an old android phone running pirate box. Sometimes people would connect at a coffee shop and that's how I found out about the band Death Grips
I wanted these to exist so badly, it was a fun and quirky concept, but people kept bashing it online as the stupidest idea ever, and the few dead drops that existed in my city routinely got destroyed.
I also built my own PirateBox too, but the only thing that was ever uploaded to it was a creepshot of me and my PirateBox. Turns out when Public Wi-Fi exists, they're actively ignored.
Oh that is creepy. I went to coffee shops with mine because I figured those were the only places anyone would notice it and possibly connect. I had a few random pictures, chats, and a Death Grips video uploaded to mine.
The dead drop website had a map but I was never anywhere near any. That sucks that people destroyed them. It's a dangerous idea, but a cheap used laptop specifically for it could be fun, but yeah, not enough people would ever do that to make it worthwhile.
For dead drops, beyond worry about viruses there is also the concern about physical security so you don't fry your device/port. Randomly plugging in unknown USB devices just has way too many downsides.
Micro SD may be safer, it’s hard to fit any large capacitors in there. Bulk cards are still not that expensive in smaller sizes.
Wifi captive portals with simple file sharing are probably the safest way to go. You could also locate it in a hard-to-reach place, or completely out of sight, to make it hard to destroy. My favorite idea is to fit a tiny ESP board inside an outlet box.
my cellphone has been named “sneakernet” for years. it’s a throwback to a time when it was faster to walk a zip disk across campus than it was to send it.
I'd walk with my CRT monitor and tower (stuffed all cables, mouse, keyboard inside) over to my friend's to play games/mess with computers a couple decades ago. We called it the "sneakernet", too.
From what I can tell, you can basically take your USB drive of "websites" to your friend, and sync it with their local folder of "websites", and now you both have the most up to date versions of your combined group of "websites". (if your usb has Website A version 1 and Website B version 2, and you sync with someone who has Website A version 2 and Website C version 1, you'd both end up with Website A V2, Website B V2 and Website C V1)
The application also apparently has protections in place so you can't just create an updated version of someone else's website and distribute it the same way to impersonate them
I belive it also goes into the larger Wormblossom Willow project where there will be an online component, so that you can distribute stuff either online or via USB, building a sensorship-resistant protocol that works both online and offline.
> sensorship-resistant protocol that works both online and offline
I think with the authoritarian and dystopian crackdown on parts of the Internet where people express opinions, this will be a key driver. It reminds me of Cuba's "El Paquete" system. I find it ironic that a system developed to circumvent state oppression should now find a potential use case in our allegedly civilised countries.
How does it work in practice is it like a whisper protocol for distributing sites among different USB drives. So my USB will start storing other sites when I meet someone to exchange data?
Cool and reminds me of a project from like 15 years ago. Forgot what it was called but basically it was just people hiding thumb drives and finding them like a geocache. Fun idea but then I remember Stuxnet and I'm like nah.
Edit: found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_dead_drop
Pirate box is mentioned on that page. I forgot about that. I used to carry around an old android phone running pirate box. Sometimes people would connect at a coffee shop and that's how I found out about the band Death Grips
>Edit: found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_dead_drop
I wanted these to exist so badly, it was a fun and quirky concept, but people kept bashing it online as the stupidest idea ever, and the few dead drops that existed in my city routinely got destroyed.
I also built my own PirateBox too, but the only thing that was ever uploaded to it was a creepshot of me and my PirateBox. Turns out when Public Wi-Fi exists, they're actively ignored.
Oh that is creepy. I went to coffee shops with mine because I figured those were the only places anyone would notice it and possibly connect. I had a few random pictures, chats, and a Death Grips video uploaded to mine.
The dead drop website had a map but I was never anywhere near any. That sucks that people destroyed them. It's a dangerous idea, but a cheap used laptop specifically for it could be fun, but yeah, not enough people would ever do that to make it worthwhile.
For dead drops, beyond worry about viruses there is also the concern about physical security so you don't fry your device/port. Randomly plugging in unknown USB devices just has way too many downsides.
USBkill, etc.
Micro SD may be safer, it’s hard to fit any large capacitors in there. Bulk cards are still not that expensive in smaller sizes.
Wifi captive portals with simple file sharing are probably the safest way to go. You could also locate it in a hard-to-reach place, or completely out of sight, to make it hard to destroy. My favorite idea is to fit a tiny ESP board inside an outlet box.
my cellphone has been named “sneakernet” for years. it’s a throwback to a time when it was faster to walk a zip disk across campus than it was to send it.
I'd walk with my CRT monitor and tower (stuffed all cables, mouse, keyboard inside) over to my friend's to play games/mess with computers a couple decades ago. We called it the "sneakernet", too.
A simpler time, with South Park on RralPlayer. And before with Leisure Suit Larry.
And if you use your cellphone as a USB mass storage device, it still is!
it’s the wifi hotspot name.
This looks like a partial reinvention of NNCP's sneakernet transport, but for a much more limited use-case: http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html
You can also run NNCP over networks if you want to.
How does this differ from just, say, giving someone an HTML dump of a static site? I don't quite understand what this protocol offers.
How exactly is it peer-to-peer if it's essentially an offline, transfer via hardware?
From what I can tell, you can basically take your USB drive of "websites" to your friend, and sync it with their local folder of "websites", and now you both have the most up to date versions of your combined group of "websites". (if your usb has Website A version 1 and Website B version 2, and you sync with someone who has Website A version 2 and Website C version 1, you'd both end up with Website A V2, Website B V2 and Website C V1)
The application also apparently has protections in place so you can't just create an updated version of someone else's website and distribute it the same way to impersonate them
I belive it also goes into the larger Wormblossom Willow project where there will be an online component, so that you can distribute stuff either online or via USB, building a sensorship-resistant protocol that works both online and offline.
> sensorship-resistant protocol that works both online and offline
I think with the authoritarian and dystopian crackdown on parts of the Internet where people express opinions, this will be a key driver. It reminds me of Cuba's "El Paquete" system. I find it ironic that a system developed to circumvent state oppression should now find a potential use case in our allegedly civilised countries.
Kind of like Usenet, but with web crap.
It would be cool to add this as a tool in copyparty! I have had a few friends come over and copy files from my home server they want to use.
Nice, modern day samizdat. Looks simple enough to use.
I wonder if there’s a Linux distro that includes tools like this. It’s not a bad idea.
No packages yet: https://repology.org/projects/?search=sneakerweb
I've just add a Nix package, but I don't know if/when it will be merged: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/539297
How does it work in practice is it like a whisper protocol for distributing sites among different USB drives. So my USB will start storing other sites when I meet someone to exchange data?
I thought this was going to be related to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
It is. Just with web tacked on to make it worse.
Seems like a mobile app is needed for this. My phone has tons of storage that is unused and always with me.
[dead]